UNION CITY, Ga. — The FBI on Wednesday searched the election office of a Georgia county that has been central to right-wing conspiracy theories over President Donald Trump’s 2020 election loss, acting just one week after the Republican leader predicted prosecutions over a contest he has baselessly insisted was tainted by widespread fraud.
The search at Fulton County’s main election facility in Union City sought records related to the 2020 election, county spokesperson Jessica Corbitt-Dominguez said. It appeared to be the most public step by law enforcement to pursue Trump’s claims of a stolen election, grievances rejected time and again by courts, state officials and audits that have found no evidence of fraud that would have altered the outcome.
It also unfolds against the backdrop of FBI and Justice Department efforts to investigate perceived political enemies of Trump, including former FBI Director James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James.
The FBI confirmed there is court authorized activity at the Fulton County Election Hub and Operation Center, Jan. 28, 2026.
WSB
Trump has for years focused on Fulton, Georgia’s most populous county and a Democratic stronghold, as a key example of what he claims went wrong in the 2020 election. His pressure campaign there culminated in a sweeping state indictment accusing him and 18 others of illegally trying to overturn the vote.
An FBI spokesperson said agents were “executing a court authorized law enforcement action” at the county’s main election office in Union City, just south of Atlanta. The spokesperson declined to provide any further information, citing an ongoing matter.
Corbitt-Dominguez said a warrant “sought a number of records related to 2020 elections,” but declined to comment further because the search was still underway.
The Justice Department had no immediate comment.
Trump has long insisted that the 2020 election was stolen even though judges across the country and his own attorney general said they found no evidence of widespread fault that tipped the contest in Democrat Joe Biden’s favor.
The president has made Georgia, one of the battleground states he lost in 2020, a central target for his complaints about the election and memorably pushed its secretary of state to help “find” enough votes to overturn the contest.
Last week, in reference to the 2020 election, he asserted that “people will soon be prosecuted for what they did.” It was not clear what in particular he was referring to.
Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis in August 2023 obtained an indictment against Trump and 18 others, accusing them of participating in a wide-ranging scheme to illegally try to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election. That case was dismissed in November after courts barred Willis and her office from pursuing it because of an “appearance of impropriety” stemming from a romantic relationship she had with a prosecutor she had appointed to lead the case.
The FBI last week moved to replace its top agent in Atlanta, Paul W. Brown, according to people familiar with the matter who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss a non-public personnel decision. It was not immediately clear why the move, which was not publicized by the FBI, was made.
The Department of Justice last month sued the clerk of the Fulton County superior and magistrate courts in federal court seeking access to documents from the 2020 election in the county. The lawsuit said the department sent a letter to Che Alexander, clerk of superior and magistrate courts, but that she has failed to produce the requested documents.
Alexander has filed a motion to dismiss the suit. The Justice Department complaint says that the purpose of its request was “ascertaining Georgia’s compliance with various federal election laws.” The attorney general is also trying to help the State Election Board with its “transparency efforts under Georgia law.”
A three-person conservative majority on the State Election Board has repeatedly sought to reopen a case alleging wrongdoing by Fulton County during the 2020 election. It passed a resolution in July seeking assistance from the U.S. attorney general to access voting materials.
The state board sent subpoenas to the county board for various election documents last year and again on Oct. 6. The October subpoena requested “all used and void ballots, stubs of all ballots, signature envelopes, and corresponding envelope digital files from the 2020 General Election in Fulton County.”
The Justice Department sent a letter to the county election board Oct. 30 citing the federal Civil Rights Act and asking for all records responsive to the October subpoena from the State Election Board. Lawyers for the county election board responded about two weeks later, saying that the records are held by the county court clerk. They also attached a letter the clerk sent to the State Election Board saying that the records are under seal in accordance with state law and can’t be released without a court order.
The Justice Department said it then sent a letter to Alexander, the clerk, on Nov. 21 requesting the documents and that she failed to respond.
The department is asking a judge to declare that the clerk’s “refusal to provide the election records upon a demand by the Attorney General” violates the Civil Rights Act. It is also asking the judge to order Alexander to produce the requested records within five days of a court order.
The State Election Board in May 2024 heard a case that alleged documentation was missing for thousands of votes in the recount of the presidential contest in the 2020 election in 2020. After a presentation by a lawyer and an investigator for the secretary of state’s office, a response from the county and a lengthy discussion among the board members, the board voted to issue a letter of reprimand to the county.
Shortly after that vote, there was a shift in power on the board, and the newly cemented conservative majority sought to reopen the case. The lone Democrat on the board and the chair have repeatedly objected, arguing the case is closed and citing multiple reviews that have found that while the county’s 2020 elections were sloppy and poorly managed there was no evidence of intentional wrongdoing.
The conservative majority voted to subpoena a slew of election records from the county in November 2024. A fight over that subpoena is tied up in court.
SANTA CRUZ, Calif. (KGO) — Millions of Americans fall for scams every year — and unfortunately once bad guys get your money, it’s usually gone for good.
But not so for a Santa Cruz mother of three. She fell for a gift card scam, but with quick action and help from 7 On Your Side, she got most of her money back!
It began when scammers persuaded a Santa Cruz mom that she was in big trouble with the law. She says she felt hypnotized into believing it — until her partner got home and snapped her out of it. And then, it was a race against time.
“They’re on my phone and in my purse, like, driving me around town,” Dax Mills of Santa Cruz recalled of those frantic moments.
“I’m in my pajamas. Not even like the cute ones. Like, these are pajamas you should not go out in public. I mean, I look like a crazy person,” she said.
Her identity had been stolen. Criminals were using it for drugs and pornography. She could be arrested at any moment.
Or so, she believed.
“Looking back on it I really feel like I was in a trance. Like I was hypnotized,” she said.
“When I got home, I saw Dax in such a manic state,” said Rob Rusin, Dax’s partner.
It all started when Miller was working online from home.
“All of a sudden… my computer started making this loud alarm sound, which I’ve never heard it make, and all these windows popped up… saying like, stop, don’t touch anything,” Miller said. “I do see a phone number on the screen, like a Microsoft support number or something like that. And so I called that phone number.”
“I let him download some program on my computer. I know you’re not supposed to do that but I don’t know why I did it, he was going to help me,” she said.
The man said he found incriminating evidence on her computer.
“That my identity has been used to create all these different bank accounts in nine different countries. And these accounts are buying child pornography. And, and I’m being watched by the DEA,” Miller said.
The man said he’d transfer her to the Drug Enforcement Administration, then to the Treasury Department to clear this up.
“… and I think I’m talking to the DEA, I think I’m talking to the Treasury Department because… they’re like, just hold on, you’re going to get a call in a minute… that there’s a warrant out for my arrest,” Miller said. “That’s why I wasn’t supposed to tell anybody about what’s happening.”
The purported “federal agents” told her to quickly get her money out of her bank accounts.
And put it in gift cards.
Miller rushed to her bank and withdrew $8,000 cash.
“At the bank, she’s in there in her pajamas, disheveled, pulling out cash,” recalled Rusin.
“I didn’t feel like I had time to even change clothes and put a brush through my hair,” said Miller. “Because if it wasn’t done by the end of the day, I’m going to go to jail.”
As instructed, she drove to a Safeway store and bought four Nordstrom gift cards, then to another Safeway to buy Target cards, and a third store to buy more Nordstrom cards.
“I know that you’re not supposed to go around town buying gift cards and yet I was like a zombie,” she said.
“They had her so wound up she was like in a trance,” said Rusin.
“It’s not that easy to buy gift cards with that much money at a self checkout… the Safeway employee was helping me, he looked me right in my face and said, ‘Are you being scammed?’ and I said no! I actually said to him… my aunt is so quirky… she’s giving out my cousins these gift cards… Oh how cute!” Miller said.
At each stop she sat in the parking lot and scratched off the card numbers, texting them to the purported DEA agents still on the phone in her purse.
“I drove home luckily my partner arrived too,” she said.
“And she wouldn’t talk to me. I said, ‘Honey, what’s wrong, what’s going on?” Rusin said.
Miller was worried the agents would hear her talking. “And I am so terrified at this point and they’re still on the phone with me. So I grab a piece of like a pad of paper and I start writing on it,” she said.
“It was a dry erase board that she picked up and was writing ‘can’t talk,’” Rusin said.
“And I wrote down, like, ‘identity theft DEA,’” Miller recounted.
But after the scammers hung up — Miller blurted it out.
“She goes, ‘It’s the DEA, and they’re going to arrest me!’ And I go honey, it’s a scam. whatever you do, don’t give them any money. And she goes, I already did!” Rusin said. “She said I spent all day giving them money.”
“And I, you know, burst into tears and cried for a couple of minutes,” Miller said. “OK, enough. We can cry later, if there’s any chance of getting our money back we have to act now.”
“I got on the phone with Nordstrom,” Rusin said.
“I was on the phone with Target,” said Miller.
Target quickly blocked all five cards. Nordstrom said the scammers had already used $1,900 worth of cards, and were about to redeem another $3,000.
Nordstrom was able to stop payment – just in time!
The only problem? Miller never got that $3,000 back.
“That’s when I contacted 7 On Your Side,” she said.
7 On Your Side contacted Safeway, where she bought the cards. The store contacted Nordstrom which issued a credit for those blocked cards — and days later, Safeway refunded her money.
“It was victory!” cried Miller. “Thank you 7 On Your Side.”
“You really helped us,” added Rusin.
The big lesson: if a Microsoft emergency pops up on your computer it’s almost certainly a scam. Do not call the number on the screen; instead find the real number on your own.
Also the federal government would never get on the phone with you — and would never ever tell you to buy gift cards.
Just to note, Safeway tells us Nordstrom could only recover $2,900 out of that $3,000. But Miler tells us she got about $100 in reward the day she bought the cards, so she was made whole.
A Safeway statement said:
“We’re pleased we could enlist Nordstrom to assist Mrs. Mills in recovering her funds from this deplorable gift card scam. While all gift card sales are final, and these scams are beyond our control, we appreciate Nordstrom’s willingness to make resolution possible in this case.”
7OYS’s consumer hotline is a free consumer mediation service for those in the San Francisco Bay Area. We assist individuals with consumer-related issues; we cannot assist on cases between businesses, or cases involving family law, criminal matters, landlord/tenant disputes, labor issues, or medical issues. Please review our FAQ here. As a part of our process in assisting you, it is necessary that we contact the company / agency you are writing about. If you do not wish us to contact them, please let us know right away, as it will affect our ability to work on your case. Due to the high volume of emails we receive, please allow 7 to 10 business days for a response.
The Spanish league is stepping up its fight against audio-visual fraud by offering 50 euros ($59) for each verified tip on the establishments broadcasting games without proper permission, it said Wednesday.
Bars, restaurants, betting places and similar establishments need to subscribe to a specific package to be able to show the games. The league said such broadcasts have a letter on the corner of the screen to identify them, allowing fans to tell whether they are legal or not.
If people see that an establishment is showing an unauthorized broadcast, they should email La Liga with images to help it verify the infraction.
The league also said it has a channel where fans can anonymously denounce illegal broadcasts.
A federal judge ruled Friday that President Trump’s administration must keep federal funds flowing to child care subsidies and other social service programs in five Democratic states — at least for now.
The ruling Friday from U.S. District Judge Vernon Broderick extends by two weeks a temporary one issued earlier this month that blocked the federal government from holding back the money from California, Colorado, Illinois, Minnesota and New York. That expires Friday.
The judge said he’d decide later whether the money is to remain in place while a challenge to cutting it off works its way through the courts.
The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services said earlier this month that it was pausing the funding because it had “reason to believe” the states were granting benefits to people in the country illegally, though it did not provide evidence or explain why it was targeting those states and not others.
The states say the move was instead intended to damage Mr. Trump’s political adversaries.
A judge previously gave the states a reprieve to the administration’s plan to halt funding for the states unless they provide information on the beneficiaries of some programs, including names and Social Security numbers. The temporary restraining order was set to expire Friday.
Around the same time as the actions aimed at the five states, the administration put up hurdles to Minnesota for even more federal dollars. It also began requesting all states to explain how they’re using money in the child care program.
The programs are the Child Care and Development Fund, which subsidizes child care for 1.3 million children from low-income families nationwide; the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program, which provides cash assistance and job training; and the Social Services Block Grant, a smaller fund that provides money for a variety of programs. The states say that they receive a total of more more than $10 billion a year from those programs — and that the programs are essential for low-income and vulnerable families.
HHS sent letters to the states on Jan. 5 and 6 telling them they would be placed on “restricted drawdown” of program money until the states provided more information.
For TANF and the Social Service Block Grant, the request required the states to submit the data, including personal information of recipients beginning in 2022, with a deadline of Jan. 20.
In court papers last week, the states said what they describe as a funding freeze does not follow the law.
They said Congress created laws about how the administration can identify noncompliance or fraud by recipients of the money — and that the federal government hasn’t used that process.
They also said it’s improper to freeze funding broadly because of potential fraud and that producing the data the government called for is an “impossible demand on an impossible timeline.”
In a court filing this week, the administration objected to the states describing the action as a “funding freeze,” even though the headline on the HHS announcement was: “HHS Freezes Child Care and Family Assistance Grants in Five States for Fraud Concerns.”
Federal government lawyers said the states could get the money going forward if they provide the requested information and the federal government finds them to be in compliance with anti-fraud measures.
The administration also notes that it has continued to provide funding to the states, not pointing out that a court ordered it to do so.
SEOUL, South Korea — Dozens of South Koreans allegedly involved in online scams in Cambodia were returned to South Korea on Friday to face investigations in what was the largest group repatriation of Korean criminal suspects from abroad.
The 73 South Korean suspects allegedly scammed fellow Koreans out of 48.6 billion won ($33 million), according to a South Korean government statement.
Upon arrival in South Korea’s Incheon airport aboard a chartered plane, the suspects — 65 men and eight women — were sent to police stations.
The suspects, in handcuffs and wearing masks, were escorted by police officers and boarding buses. They were among about 260 South Koreans detained in a crackdown in Cambodia in recent months.
“When it comes to crimes that harm our people, we’ll track down and arrest those involved to the very end and get them to face corresponding consequences,” senior police officer Yoo Seung Ryul told a televised briefing at the airport.
Public outrage over scam centers in Southeast Asia flared up in South Korea when a Korean student was found dead last summer after reportedly being forced to work at a scam compound in Cambodia. Authorities said at the time that he died after being tortured and beaten, and South Korea sent a government delegation to Cambodia in October for talks on a joint response.
The suspects repatriated Friday include a couple who allegedly operated a deepfake romance scam to dupe 12 billion won ($8.2 million) from about 100 people in fraudulent investment schemes. South Korea has made various efforts to bring them back home, including more than 10 rounds of video meetings with Cambodian officials, the Justice Ministry said in a statement.
At the airport briefing, senior Foreign Ministry official Yoo Byung-seok expressed gratitude to the Cambodian government over Friday’s repatriation. He said that South Korea hopes to continue close bilateral coordination until online scams targeting South Koreans are eradicated in Cambodia.
Cybercrime has flourished in Southeast Asia, particularly in Cambodia and Myanmar, as trafficked foreign nationals were employed to run romance and cryptocurrency scams, often after being recruited with false job offers and then forced to work in conditions of near-slavery. According to estimates from the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime, scam victims worldwide lost between $18 billion and $37 billion in 2023.
Cambodian Information Minister Neth Pheaktra said in a statement that the deportation of the 73 South Koreans, along with 136 Myanmar citizens, was part of his government’s efforts to crack down on cross-border crime and combat technology-based fraud. The statement said that Cambodian authorities detained 5,106 suspects of 23 nationalities and deported 4,534 to their countries of origin over the past seven months.
In January, Cambodia said that it had arrested and extradited to China a tycoon accused of running a huge online scam operation.
Since October, about 130 South Korean scam suspects from Cambodia as well as more than 20 such Korean suspects from Laos, Vietnam, Thailand and the Philippines have been sent back home. After Friday’s repatriation, about 60 South Koreans will remain detained in Cambodia awaiting repatriation, according to police.
Neth Pheaktra’s statement said that Cambodia deported 244 South Korean nationals last year.
South Korean officials said in October that about 1,000 South Koreans were estimated to be in scam centers in Cambodia. Some are believed to be forced laborers.
On Thursday, South Korean President Lee Jae Myung called for stern responses to transnational cybercrimes that he said erodes mutual trust in society and triggers diplomatic disputes with other countries.
Conservative commentator Benny Johnson recently said he had evidence of California voter fraud.
Addressing a camera as he stood in a parking lot with portable toilets, Johnson held up a pile of papers.
“Twenty-six registered voters at this exact location, 100 Sunset Avenue in Venice,” he said, citing “the registrar at the secretary of state.”
“Straight-up voter fraud out in the open,” Johnson said in a Jan. 16 X post: “This (is) just a glimpse of what’s happening under Gavin Newsom,” referring to the state’s Democratic governor.
The video had been viewed 1.3 million times as of Jan. 21.
PolitiFact asked Johnson about the video but received no response.
But the parking lot at the address in Johnson’s video used to be a temporary housing facility. Known as the Bridge Home, the facility opened in February 2020 to provide emergency shelter, hygiene services, storage, food services and case management to homeless people, local records show. Before it closed at the end of 2024, the shelter was part of a program that provided a “bridge” between street homelessness and long-term or permanent housing.
Mike Sanchez, a Los Angeles County Registrar-Recorder spokesperson, told PolitiFact that the address was associated with a shelter or transitional housing site. CityWatch reported the shelter officially closed on Dec. 31, 2024.
“Under California law, eligible voters experiencing homelessness may register using a shelter as their physical location for voting,” Sanchez wrote in an email. As of Jan. 20, he said, there were 23 active voter records associated with the address.
“This is not evidence of voter fraud,” he said.
Sanchez said that if a facility address is used as a mailing address and voting materials are returned undeliverable, election officials follow standard list-maintenance protocols. That can include inactivating someone’s voter registration until the voter updates or confirms the address.
“Any ballots cast by voters associated with these records are subject to the same verification and security as all ballots, including signature verification and the statutory notice-and-cure process,” Sanchez wrote.
People can register to vote as long as they have a location where they can receive mail and be properly assigned to a voting precinct. People cannot use a P.O. box or business address to register to vote, but it can be used as a mailing address.
The Secretary of State’s website says that in cases in which voters have no home address they can use to register, they must describe the location where they live, so county elections officials can find their voting precinct. People can use cross streets or parks as their addresses.
All eligible voters have the right to vote, including people experiencing homelessness. The 2025 Greater Los Angeles Homeless Count says there are 72,308 homeless people in Los Angeles County.
Two years after a wave of public benefit thefts that left low-income Californians scrambling to pay rent and afford food each month, Gov. Gavin Newsom is touting a significant decline in the reported amount stolen.
The thefts still amounted to more than $4 million a month last fall in both the CalFresh food assistance and CalWorks cash welfare benefits programs, according to a press release from Newsom’s office. That’s down from two years ago, when public benefits recipients were reporting $20 million a month stolen from their accounts. The state uses taxpayer money to reimburse victims when they report theft.
Newsom credited the reduction to the state’s rollout of anti-fraud technology such as more secure electronic benefit (EBT) cards with electronic chips.
“In California, we’re leading the way by turning innovation into action by stopping theft and ensuring benefits reach those who truly need them,” he said in a press release.
Newsom’s office announced the improved theft numbers last week after the Trump administration ramped up threats to California over allegations of fraud in public benefits. The president has used a wave of prosecutions over social services fraud in Minnesota, some of it allegedly by immigrants, as a reason to send immigration agents to conduct aggressive raids in Minneapolis.
Earlier this month the Trump administration froze some federal social services funding to five Democratic-led states, including California. A judge halted the freeze, which included funds for the CalWorks cash aid program, for now.
The kind of fraud in which Newsom was touting reductions is not traditional “welfare fraud” perpetrated by recipients of public benefits, but rather theft by a third party. Local social services officials have said fraud by recipients is relatively uncommon.
Thieves have been taking advantage of California benefits recipients by using hidden “skimming” devices to steal card numbers from EBT cards loaded with CalFresh food assistance and CalWorks cash welfare benefits. They then duplicate the cards and drain them of cash or make large purchases using CalFresh, before the recipients have a chance to spend their own benefits.
California was particularly susceptible because of the size of the state’s social safety net, with roughly 300,000 families receiving cash aid and 3 million receiving food assistance. CalMatters reported in 2023 that the state, previously focused on detecting fraud committed by recipients of the benefits, had also ignored warnings and delayed a proposal to introduce chipped EBT cards.
When the pandemic brought new benefits from the federal and state governments, such as boosted unemployment benefits and stimulus checks, thieves wielding card skimmers followed the money. EBT cards, which contained only a magnetic strip at the time, were among the most vulnerable to theft. Nearly 200 people have been charged across California in the EBT schemes, Newsom’s office said.
Since 2023 the state responded to the skimming crisis by issuing chipped EBT cards and introducing an app allowing recipients to freeze their EBT accounts to prevent withdrawals. Last year, Newsom said, the state began using a computer model to detect fraudulent withdrawals and forced resets of some CalWorks’ recipients EBT card PINs.
But local welfare fraud investigators said the Newsom’s numbers paint too rosy a picture of the theft.
Gregory Mahony, president of the California Welfare Fraud Investigators Association, said he believes the state’s reported thefts are undercounted.
The figures are based on how much the state reimburses county welfare departments each month to return victims’ benefits. But some recipients don’t bother making a report, or report months of thefts but only get some of the money reimbursed, Mahony said.
He also criticized the California Department of Social Services for dropping a requirement in 2023 that victims file police reports each time their benefits are stolen in order to get a reimbursement. That’s hurt the state’s tracking of theft and fraud, Mahony said.
“This is not a systemic victory,” he said in a statement. “It is a delayed and partial mitigation of a crisis long allowed to grow unchecked.”
This story was originally published by CalMatters and distributed through a partnership with The Associated Press.
Copyright 2026 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
The Trump administration has justified its ongoing immigration crackdown in Minnesota by citing a need to curb fraud and pointing to a widening scandal involving members of the Somali American community. Yet prosecutors say the mastermind of the state’s biggestfraud scheme to date was not Somali but a White woman — 45-year-old Aimee Bock.
In an exclusive interview from her jail cell, Bock defended her conduct, admitted regrets and argued that state officials who she worked with should bear some of the blame. It was the first time Bock spoke publicly since she was arrested for her role in what prosecutors say was a $250 million COVID-era effort to defraud a federal program to feed hungry children.
“I wish I could go back and do things differently, stop things, catch things,” said Bock, who was the head of Feeding Our Future, the now-infamous nonprofit that signed up restaurants and caterers to receive taxpayer money for providing meals to kids. “I believed we were doing everything in our power to protect the program.”
So far, prosecutors have charged 78 defendants connected to Feeding Our Future, with more than 60 pleading guilty or convicted at trial. All are Somali American, except for Aimee Bock.
Aimee Bock in jail in Minnesota.
CBS News
During a five-week trial last year, prosecutors alleged Bock signed off reimbursement claims for millions of meals that were never served. She was also charged with collecting bribes. Together, she and the meal site operators were accused of stealing tens of millions of federal dollars and spending it on luxury cars, real estate ventures and vacations.
“That money did not go to feed kids,” said Acting U.S. Attorney Lisa D. Kirkpatrick at the time. “It was used to fund their lavish lifestyle.”
A jury convicted her on all counts. She’s now awaiting sentencing and faces up to 33 years in prison. Evidence submitted at trial included text messages where Bock compared Feeding Our Future to the mob.
“The jury saw overwhelming evidence of what Bock knew,” said lead prosecutor Joe Thompson following the verdict. “She was at the head of the scheme from Day One. She signed every single fraudulent claim that was submitted to the state of Minnesota.”
Bock told CBS News she was neither mastermind nor mob boss.
“It was heartbreaking,” Bock said, describing the moment she heard the verdict. “I believe in accountability. If I had done this, I would’ve pled guilty. I wouldn’t have gone to trial. I wouldn’t have put my children and my family through what we’ve been through. I’ve lost everything.”
Last month, a judge ordered her to forfeit more than $5 million in proceeds from the scheme.
“We relied on the state”
Most of the millions federal officials seized from her were sitting in a bank account for the nonprofit, and Bock denied she personally lived a lavish lifestyle. She downplayed the items FBI agents found at her home when they raided it in 2022 — a home she had lived in for more than a decade.
“They found minimal jewelry,” Bock said. “I believe it was like two pairs of earrings, a bracelet, a watch. There was some cash there.”
Bock’s attorney, Kenneth Udoibok, shared video showing stacks of food at meal sites operated by Feeding Our Future contractors. Bock said she was doing everything in her power to root out fraud and terminated agreements with dozens of entities she believed were cheating the system.
“I was the only one that stopped a claim and said, this is fraudulent,” Bock said. “There are tens of millions of dollars in claims that we did not pay, that we refused.”
The sudden growth of Bock’s organization was staggering. In 2019, Feeding Our Future submitted $3.4 million worth of meal claims. In 2021, it submitted nearly $200 million. Bock attributed the increase to the looser guidelines during the pandemic that allowed parents to pick up meals and bring them home. Asked whether the spike in volume raised red flags at the time, Bock claimed she had sign-off from Minnesota officials.
“We relied on the state,” she said, adding that local officials, including Rep. Ilhan Omar, would often visit the meal sites. “We told the state, this site is going to operate at this address, this time, and this number of children. The state would then tell us that’s approved.”
Omar has denied she was aware of individuals defrauding the food program, and previously has condemned the misuse of funds. Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz has drawn widespread scrutiny for his handling of fraud in the state. But Walz has defended his administration’s response, saying “we’ve spent years cracking down on fraudsters” and accusing the Trump administration of “politicizing the issue to defund programs that help Minnesotans.”
Udoibok, Bock’s attorney, said state officials at the time weren’t particularly interested in stopping the fraud, because the nonprofit was providing at least some food to an important constituency during a time of significant instability.
“What is a lie is that they were policing this fraudulent activity at any time,” Udoibok said. “They wanted a scapegoat. She ran the only food program in the state, so they pinned it on her.”
A spokesperson for Walz did not respond to a request for comment.
“Nobody wants to be labeled a racist”
Bock spoke to CBS News in the aftermath of the killing of Renee Good, as Minneapolis became a flashpoint in the administration’s push to crackdown on illegal immigration. According to Bock, some of the individuals picked up in ICE sweeps are now being held at the jail where she is being held until she is sentenced.
In some ways, it’s possible to trace origins of the current tensions in Minnesota to Bock and her nonprofit. Good was killed by an ICE agent after the Department of Homeland Security surged thousands of personnel into the state with a twin mandate to enforce immigration laws and help investigate fraud.
Yet long before the issue of fraud became a galvanizing issue for the right — and fodder for conservative influencers — federal prosecutors in Minnesota had zeroed in on Bock. A lifelong Minnesotan, Bock earned a degree in elementary education and held roles at day cares and early childhood centers before starting Feeding Our Future in 2016.
“Our goal as an organization was to reach the kids that were not being fed,” said Bock, who has two sons of her own. “There is kind of this quiet need in Minnesota, these food deserts, where there’s just not access to healthy nutritionist food for children.”
The nonprofit became a so-called “sponsor” for two federal nutrition programs funded by the Department of Agriculture and overseen by Minnesota’s Education Department that paid for kids’ meals during the school year and over the summer. When COVID hit, the USDA issued waivers that gave sponsors like Feeding Our Future more flexibility in how they distributed the food.
“During COVID, for obvious reasons, parents were allowed to come and pick up meals,” Bock explained. “So we suddenly were able to reach more children. We were also able to deliver meals to homes.”
Restaurants and caterers, particularly from Minnesota’s large Somali immigrant community, were eager to sign up. Bock said her organization was well-positioned to fill the need, but state education officials were wary about letting in some of the business that applied.
“The Department of Education was sitting on the applications,” Bock said. “They were just not processing them.”
As racial justice protests swept the country in the wake of the killing of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer, Bock filed a lawsuit, alleging the state’s scrutiny of Somali applicants was discriminatory and deprived low-income and minority children access to “desperately needed federal food programs.”
Asked how she believed state officials received the lawsuit, Bock acknowledged “nobody wants to be labeled as racist.”
That aggressive advocacy won her praise from the tight-knit Somali community. One community leader told a local reporter Bock was “a modern-day Robin Hood.”
Bock denied the lawsuit was a scare tactic. The parties reached a settlement where Minnesota’s Education Department agreed to process applications to the meal program “reasonably promptly.”
“The notion that a state government is paralyzed and has to allow this level of fraud because they were afraid of what I might do in a lawsuit is preposterous,” Bock said.
Years later, education officials told a state watchdog “the threat of legal consequences and negative media attention” intimidated them into easing off. Still, officials with Minnesota’s Department of Education (MDE) insist they did act, noting they were the ones who referred Bock to the FBI in 2021.
As the backlog has grown for many employment-basedU.S. visas, applications have skyrocketed for the so-called “Einstein visa” reserved for people who can show extraordinary ability in their fields.
But as interest has spiked in the high-achiever visa, called the EB-1A, so has a market for credential-boosting services that in some cases may constitute fraud, a CBS News investigation found.
Some visa hopefuls, especially in science and technology fields, have turned to a marketplace of services to pad their resumes with false or low-quality records of achievement. Research brokers or consultants ghostwrite research papers, boost article citations, or confer vanity awards to customers willing to pay up to hundreds or thousands of dollars.
U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, which processes the applications, is aware that a growing number of EB-1A applicants have been applying with purchased or fraudulent credentials, two former USCIS officials familiar with the agency’s fraud investigations told CBS News.
“If you have money, then you have a way to buy your evidence and fabricate those things,” said the official, who left the agency last year and spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal operations at USCIS.
Those who are caught misrepresenting themselves or using fraudulent credentials on a visa application may simply have their application denied, but could also be prevented from successfully reapplying for a visa by being deemed inadmissible to the U.S. USCIS could also revoke an existing visa from someone if they find they lied on their application.
“USCIS is committed to rooting out fraud by thoroughly screening and vetting all aliens seeking immigration benefits,” agency spokesman Matthew Tragesser wrote in a statement to CBS News. “Anyone submitting fake evidence or misrepresenting themselves will be found out and face the consequences.”
But those who sell the credentials, middlemen who often operate anonymously on social media or through companies marketed as consulting groups, profit regardless.
Academic research brokers
The number of EB-1A petitions has tripled over the past four years, according to quarterly data from USCIS. Nearly 7,500 applied from April to June 2025, the most recent available data shows, up from about 2,500 in the last three months of 2021.
Meanwhile, the approval rate for EB-1A petitions has been dropping since 2021, with about 67% approved from April to June 2025. Data from immigration analytics platform Lawfully indicates it dropped to closer to 50% in recent months.
Applicants must demonstrate they meet at least three of 10 criteria to be considered for an EB-1A visa, such as winning awards, authoring scholarly articles, or being a member of a professional association.
CBS News identified dozens of posts and advertisements on Telegram, Facebook and in WhatsApp groups marketing scholarly papers that customers can pay to have their names on. Several posts specifically targeted visa applicants.
WhatsApp and Facebook owner Meta confirmed some of the posts violated their policies around fake documents, frauds and scams, in which they ban content that “enables users to get visa approvals without fulfilling normal requirements.” Meta removed the ads that CBS News sent to a company spokesperson as examples.
Two social media advertisements for ghostwriting services targeting visa applicants
Three individuals who posted advertisements told CBS News that clients didn’t need to contribute to the papers to be listed as authors.
One individual running a visa “profile enhancement” Facebook page told software engineer Abhishek Bakare in May that for $500, he could list him as the fourth author on a computer science research paper, according to a recording of a phone call between the two that Bakare shared with CBS News.
Bakare, who developed an artificial intelligence tool to spot low-quality research, had feigned interest in making a purchase to gather information on the fraud, he told CBS News.
“Already I was working on this [paper] from the past four to five months,” the seller told Bakare on the phone. “I’m adding you literally at the very last stage.”
He later added that at the time, he had 55 clients, all of them Indian nationals and most aiming for EB-1A or similar employment-based visas.
“There are people, those who have paid, they have basically purchased a paper,” the seller admitted, “which is not sort of ethical for EB-1.”
A paper with the same title as the one he offered Bakare was accepted by an international conference co-sponsored by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), a widely-respected organization within the electrical engineering industry.
When CBS News contacted the seller, he denied that he offered to sell the authorship position to Bakare, and instead claimed the $500 was for a conference fee. If Bakare had moved forward with working with him, he said, he would have had to create the conference presentation to get his name on the paper.
“My process is the same for everyone: without actively working on a paper, it isn’t practically possible for me to add anyone,” he wrote in a WhatsApp message. “I have not done this in the past, I am not doing it now, and I will not do so in the future.”
Some papers are published not just to confer authorship to a paying customer, but simply to cite an existing paper to make it appear more credible. One of the research brokers CBS News spoke with, based in Nigeria, charges $500 for a citation.
“I will boost citations by writing 100% human written articles and publishing them to a journal but I will include your article references in the reference section,” he wrote in a WhatsApp message to CBS News.
He told CBS News he has a team of 10 people who work on the writing and publication process. All of his clients are trying to get U.S. visas, he said.
Low-quality scientific research produced for resume padding isn’t an activity exclusive to visa applicants, according to researchers at Northwestern University and The University of Sydney. They found in a recent study that low-quality or plagiarized papers are increasingly published not only in predatory, pay-to-publish platforms, but reputable journals as well.
They discovered that a small group of bad actors were hired as editors at reputable journals, allowing them to “accept for publication pretty much anything,” said Luis Amarol, one of the study’s authors.
“It’s almost like a spy movie, right? You send a spy to infiltrate a place and that spy inside is actually betraying the organization,” he said.
In some cases, individuals will submit a paper to a journal, and once they secure acceptance, request to add authors during the editing process, said Reese Richardson, another author on the study. This allows research brokers to sell authorship slots in papers that are all but guaranteed to be published.
“Profile building” services
The EB-1A criteria extend beyond papers and citations. That has led to the rise of “profile building” services that promise to help customers enhance their resumes, CBS News found.
Arizona-based Next League Program‘s website says that clients will become eligible candidates for EB-1A visas in “a matter of a few months,” and previously promised that participants will become authors of at least one book, over 100 articles and become a founder of an institution with a patent to their name. Its owner, Ranjeet Mudholkar, says that 56 individuals who completed the Next League Program received EB-1A visas.
Two former participants shared receipts showing they paid about $10,000 to enroll. Company lawyers said in court documents that it earned $1 million in revenue in 2024.
“In my mind it was like, I will get a helping hand to accomplish those things with little time from my end,” said one former participant, referring to the website’s promises. He added that he believed the program’s director had connections with journals and award companies that would help him achieve the credentials.
He and another participant who spoke with CBS News requested their names be withheld because they signed a non-disparagement agreement.
In return for their payments, they received dozens of hours of pre-recorded videos with advice on how to hone their areas of expertise and prepare their applications. Neither said they thought the guidance was adequate to build the resume the program’s website advertised, and neither received the one-on-one coaching they said they were promised, which required making their way through the prerecorded content first.
They soon came to believe that some Next League participants were buying their credentials, they told CBS News.
At least seven successful EB-1A applicants who completed the program received the same vanity award, called the Globee Business Award, a review by CBS News found. Immigration attorneys told CBS News that although the award’s website claims it has a “rigorous and comprehensive judging process,” it is easily obtained by those who pay a fee.
At least two of those individuals had published scholarly articles in an India-based journal whose website promises to publish peer-reviewed papers within four hours of submission after publication fees were received. One of them told CBS News their review took a few days, and that she chose it because it had lower submission fees.
Richardson, the academic fraud researcher, reviewed the journal and described it as “predatory,” identifying several alleged red flags to CBS News. A genuine peer review process takes months, often longer than a year, and there is no guarantee after an article is submitted to a legitimate journal that it will be sent out for peer review or that it will be published, he said. The journal’s editors did not respond to a CBS News request for comment.
When asked about purchased credentials, Mudholkar wrote in a statement to CBS News that the company “does not sell, require, or mandate any specific awards, journals, or publications, nor does it submit evidence without legal review and advisement,” and that “participants retain agency over where they publish.”
A few of the Next League Program participants also set up a professional organization, the American Association of Information Technology Professionals. Mudholkar agreed to be the chairman, so they would have a U.S. citizen on paper as its leader, he told CBS News. Being a member of a professional organization or society meets one of the EB-1A criteria.
In an interview with CBS News, Mudholkar disputed the idea that Next League Program’s sole purpose is to help visa hopefuls meet these criteria.
“You really need to be an expert in your field,” he said. “We are looking for people who have changed lives.”
He described the program as a “transformation coaching program” that follows a process he patented, and said that he encourages applicants to view the visa as a “milestone” in becoming the best version of themselves.
Mudholkar also repeatedly emphasized that the company’s status as an alternative business structure in Arizona lends it a layer of regulatory overview other companies don’t have. The structure allows non-lawyers to run a company that provides legal services, and requires getting a license from the state Supreme Court.
In interviews, two former participants Mudholkar referred to CBS News praised the program and credited it with helping them get an EB-1A visa. But multiple others wrote on social media or in complaints to the Arizona attorney general’s office that they felt they were scammed.
“As with any selective, high-intensity program, experiences vary. Public praise and criticism both exist,” Mudholkar wrote to CBS News.
Profile building services can blur the line of what’s considered fraudulent.
“Having an attorney or career coach help you apply to legitimate opportunities that can raise an applicants’ profile is not wrong,” Locke said. “That line between what’s appropriate like profile building, what’s fair-game versus what’s shady, it can be difficult to spot.”
A yearslong backlog meets a USCIS crackdown
Federal law sets annual limits for each visa category. In FY 2025, the cap was 140,000 employment-based visas, including EB-1A, with no more than 7% going to nationals of one single country, regardless of its population.
That can create huge backlogs, particularly for applicants from India and China, where demand for U.S. employment-based visas is high. Many of the services and advertisements CBS News reviewed appeared to target Indian nationals, who have to wait years to receive certain visas.
The EB-1 visa, of which EB-1A is a subcategory, is less backlogged than the EB-2 visa, which is reserved for those with “exceptional ability,” but does not require the same level of acclaim as the EB-1A.
That’s helped make EB-1A — and the marketplace of services around it — more popular.
“They’ve been put in a situation just that’s super untenable, which increases desperation, which increases risk taking.” Locke said.
The vast majority of EB-1A applicants are not fraudulent, said Melissa Warburton, an immigration attorney who left USCIS last year. Investigations into EB-1A fraud, which Warburton said predate the current administration, are coinciding with a broader crackdown on fraud in visa applications.
“We are going to be here with our agents investigating large scale fraud patterns,” said USCIS director Joseph Edlow in an October interview with CBS News’s Camilo Montoya-Galvez.
In its recent hiring push for immigration service officers, USCIS created the new title of “homeland defenders.” Its informational webpage includes a video of Edlow saying the agency is “declaring war on fraud.”
USCIS announced in early December it was launching a new vetting center focused on “more thorough supplemental review of immigration applications and petitions.”
It is not clear how much of this effort will be directed toward EB-1A petitions, which make up less than 1% of the total applications USCIS processes each year.
“USCIS is strengthening the integrity of all immigrant worker programs with increased screening and vetting in support of President Trump’s promise to protect American jobs and workers,” Tragesser, the agency spokesperson, wrote to CBS News. “Anti-fraud measures apply to EB-1A as they do to all immigration benefit categories.”
This month, the agency will propose a new regulation that will, among other changes, “update provisions governing extraordinary ability,” “modernize outdated provisions” and “clarify evidentiary requirements” for the visa.
USCIS may now be going back and reevaluating some EB-1A applications it already approved to check for fraud, immigration attorneys and the former USCIS employees said. The agency can revoke a visa, and even initiate a denaturalization process, if it can prove willful misrepresentation or fraud.
“We don’t know to what extent people have done this,” said immigration attorney Evan Law, “but if they did commit fraud, it will come back to them eventually, in my view.”
Speaking in Detroit, President Donald Trump said unearthing and ending fraud nationwide would eliminate the country’s deficit.
Trump criticized public services fraud by Somalis in Minnesota and also said there is fraud in “many other places.”
“If we stop this fraud, this massive fraud, we’re going to have a balanced budget,” Trump said Jan. 13 at the Detroit Economic Club. We also fact-checked other statements from that speech.
In Minnesota, investigators have identified fraud involving federal money for housing programs, autism services and child nutrition. Federal prosecutors charged dozens of defendants beginning in 2022 — before Trump’s current term — and have filed more charges since Trump took office in 2025.
So far, the Minnesota fraud charges involve a minimum of hundreds of millions of dollars. Assistant U.S. Attorney Joe Thompson, who led Minnesota fraud prosecutions, said in December that Medicaid fraud in the state could reach $9 billion, although not all of that would be federal money. (Thompson resigned Jan. 13.)
Adding the dollars lost to fraud in Minnesota to federal losses elsewhere — which have been estimated as high as $521 billion annually — would not come close to the amount of the federal deficit. The fiscal year 2025 deficit — that year’s difference between revenues and spending — was $1.775 trillion.
“You can’t balance the books on waste, fraud, and abuse,” said Steve Ellis, president of Taxpayers for Common Sense, a group that tracks the federal budget. “It’s important to root it out, but the only way you get anywhere close to a balanced budget is fiscal restraint.”
The White House did not immediately respond to an inquiry for this article.
Federal report in 2024 found hundreds of billions of dollars in fraud
In April 2024, the Government Accountability Office, during the tenure of former President Joe Biden, produced what it called a “first-of-its kind, government-wide estimate of federal dollars lost to fraud.”
The office estimated $233 billion to $521 billion lost in fraud per year, based on 2018 to 2022 data from agency inspectors general and fraud reports submitted to the Office of Management and Budget.
The GAO’s topline figure included not only official fraud findings from legal proceedings but also estimates based on individual agencies’ findings of fraud. The agency also extrapolated figures it believed represented undetected fraud.
The estimated annual losses amounted to 3% to 7% of what the government spent on average in those years.
Joshua Sewell, director of research and policy at Taxpayers for Common Sense, previously cautioned that the GAO report is filled with caveats, including its overlap with the coronavirus pandemic, which resulted in increased spending.
Still, “it’s very, very unlikely that there is enough fraud in the federal government to balance the budget,” said Chris Towner, policy director for the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, a fiscally hawkish group. “For the $1.775 trillion deficit for that year to have been due to fraud, it would mean that one-quarter of federal spending was fraudulent, or some combination of fraudulent lost tax revenue and federal outlays totaled that amount.”
Another challenge is that fraud is not easy to root out entirely. Historically, “only a small percentage of tax dollars lost to fraud are ever actually recovered by the government,” said Bob Westbrooks, a fraud and corruption risk expert who served as executive director of the federal government’s Pandemic Response Accountability Committee.
Trump administration has sought to investigate fraud in blue states
In recent weeks, Trump has spotlighted fraud in blue states such as Minnesota. But there have been notable high-dollar fraud investigations in other states, too.
In Mississippi, a solidly Republican state, a trial is underway in a welfare scandal that auditors said resulted in the loss of $100 million in federal money from 2016 to 2020.
In 2024, the U.S. Sentencing Commission pointed to the Southern District of Florida as the nation’s top district for fraud, adding that nationwide government benefits fraud offenses had increased 242% since 2020. Florida is also a red state.
Earlier this month, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services froze access to certain child care and family assistance funds for California, Colorado, Illinois, Minnesota and New York — all blue states — saying it was related to fraud concerns. A federal judge blocked it temporarily.
Our ruling
Trump said, “If we stop this fraud, this massive fraud, we’re going to have a balanced budget.”
The amount of fraud committed against federal programs is large, but the dollar amount does not come close to equalling the dollar amount of the federal deficit.
The highest nationwide fraud estimate puts fraud losses at $521 billion. If all of that could be recouped, it would still be less than a third of the 2025 deficit.
At least six career prosecutors in the Minneapolis U.S. Attorney’s office — including Assistant U.S. Attorney Joe Thompson — have resigned as the office continues to face pressure to treat the investigation of the fatal shooting of a Minneapolis woman by an ICE officer as an assault on a federal officer case.
Thompson also previously served as the acting U.S. attorney for Minnesota; he was appointed by President Trump in June and served in the position until October. He resigned from the attorney’s office along with Harry Jacobs, Melinda Williams, Thomas Calhoun-Lopez, Ruth Schneider and Tom Hollenhurst.
CBS could not immediately confirm the reasons for all the resignations. The New York Times has reported that senior DOJ officials were seeking a criminal investigation into the actions of the widow and whether she had ties to “activist groups.”
Thompson was the lead prosecutor in the Feeding Our Future case, a COVID-era $250 million scheme which targeted programs that were meant to feed schoolchildren. Since then he’s charged defendants for allegedly defrauding housing and autism service programs, claiming that fraud in Minnesota has topped $9 billion, a figure which Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz has pushed back on.
The NYT reported Tuesday that a number of people familiar with Thompson’s decision said he also objected to federal investigators refusing to cooperate with Minnesota state agencies in investigating Good’s killing.
Since the massive fraud scandal, Mr. Trump has lashed out at Minnesota’s large Somali-American community, as many of the Feeding Our Future defendants are of Somali descent. His administration cited the fraud scandal as impetus for deploying thousands of federal immigration agents to the Minneapolis area.
Walz called Thompson’s resignation a “huge loss for our state.”
“It’s also the latest sign Trump is pushing nonpartisan career professionals out of the justice department, replacing them with his sycophants,” Walz said on X.
Sen. Amy Klobuchar said on X that “these career public servants have served our state through multiple tragedies and critical investigations. We cannot allow prosecutors to be driven by politics. The family and loved ones of Renee Good deserve justice, not political attacks.”
At least six career prosecutors in the Minneapolis U.S. Attorney’s office — including Assistant U.S. Attorney Joe Thompson — have resigned as the office continues to face pressure to treat the investigation of the fatal shooting of a Minneapolis woman by an ICE officer as an assault on a federal officer case.
Thompson also previously served as the acting U.S. attorney for Minnesota; he was appointed by President Trump in June and served in the position until October. He resigned from the attorney’s office along with Harry Jacobs, Melinda Williams, Thomas Calhoun-Lopez, Ruth Schneider and Tom Hollenhurst.
CBS could not immediately confirm the reasons for all the resignations. The New York Times has reported that senior DOJ officials were seeking a criminal investigation into the actions of the widow and whether she had ties to “activist groups.”
Thompson was the lead prosecutor in the Feeding Our Future case, a COVID-era $250 million scheme which targeted programs that were meant to feed schoolchildren. Since then he’s charged defendants for allegedly defrauding housing and autism service programs, claiming that fraud in Minnesota has topped $9 billion, a figure which Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz has pushed back on.
The NYT reported Tuesday that a number of people familiar with Thompson’s decision said he also objected to federal investigators refusing to cooperate with Minnesota state agencies in investigating Good’s killing.
Since the massive fraud scandal, Mr. Trump has lashed out at Minnesota’s large Somali-American community, as many of the Feeding Our Future defendants are of Somali descent. His administration cited the fraud scandal as impetus for deploying thousands of federal immigration agents to the Minneapolis area.
Walz called Thompson’s resignation a “huge loss for our state.”
“It’s also the latest sign Trump is pushing nonpartisan career professionals out of the justice department, replacing them with his sycophants,” Walz said on X.
Sen. Amy Klobuchar said on X that “these career public servants have served our state through multiple tragedies and critical investigations. We cannot allow prosecutors to be driven by politics. The family and loved ones of Renee Good deserve justice, not political attacks.”
A federal judge ruled Friday that President Donald Trump’s administration cannot block federal money for child care subsidies and other programs aimed at supporting low-income families with children from flowing to five Democratic-led states for now.
The states of California, Colorado, Illinois, Minnesota and New York argued that a policy announced Tuesday to freeze billions of dollars in funds for three grant programs is having an immediate impact on them and creating “operational chaos.” In court filings and a hearing earlier Friday, the states contended that the government did not have a legal reason for withholding the money from them.
The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services said it was pausing the funding because it had “reason to believe” the states were granting benefits to people in the country illegally, though it did not provide evidence or explain why it was targeting those states and not others.
U.S. District Judge Arun Subramanian, who was nominated to the bench by President Joe Biden, did not rule on the legality of the funding freeze but said the five states met a legal threshold “to protect the status quo” for at least 14 days while arguments are made in court.
Health department officials did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The affected programs are the Child Care and Development Fund, which subsidizes child care for 1.3 million children from low-income families; the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program, which provides cash assistance and job training; and the Social Services Block Grant, a smaller fund that provides money for a variety of programs.
The five states say they receive a total of more than $10 billion a year from the programs.
New York Attorney General Letitia James, who is leading the lawsuit, called the ruling a “critical victory for families whose lives have been upended by this administration’s cruelty.”
The government had requested reams of data from the five states, including the names and Social Security numbers of everyone who received benefits from some of the programs since 2022.
The states argue that the effort is unconstitutional and is intended to go after Trump’s political adversaries rather than to stamp out fraud in government programs — something the states say they already do.
Jessica Ranucci, a lawyer in James’ office, said during the Friday hearing that at least four of the states had already had money delayed after requesting it. She said that if the states can’t get child care funds, there will be immediate uncertainty for providers and families who rely on the programs.
A lawyer for the federal government, Kamika Shaw, said it was her understanding that the money had not stopped flowing to states.
The other 45 states face a new requirement to check attendance at child care centers and submit “strong justification for the use of funds” that aligns with the program’s purpose.
At about the same time the judge stopped the freeze on the child care subsidies, Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins announced that the administration would freeze about $130 million a year in funding from her agency to Minnesota.
Rollins said the state’s inability to stop fraud schemes led to the decision. Seventy-eight people have been charged since 2022 — and 57 convicted — after federal prosecutors said the Minnesota nonprofit group Feeding Our Future stole $250 million from a program meant to feed children in need during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz’s office did not immediately have a comment Friday evening. The state’s attorney general, Keith Ellison, said he’d fight the new freeze of funds in court.
In a letter to Walz that Rollins shared on social media, she suggested the state could restore its access to the funding by providing justification for how it spent federal dollars over the past year. All the state’s future transactions involving money from the agency will require the same justification, she said.
Walz and Minnesota have become a main target of the administration in Trump’s second term.
And this week the administration launched the largest immigration enforcement operation in history in Minneapolis, leading to a fatal shooting of a woman by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent.
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Geoff Mulvihill, Hannah Schoenbaum, The Associated Press
“Minnesota is going to be the protocols, procedures and investigative techniques and collaboration. Minnesota is going to be the genesis for a national rollout,” Bessent said. “Treasury will deploy all tools to bring an end to this egregious, unchecked fraud and hold perpetrators to account.”
According to Bessent, the IRS task force will specifically probe financial institutions that facilitate wire transfers, as evidence from the Feeding Our Future trial showed some suspects sent money to banks in Kenya and China. Bessent added that four Twin Cities-based businesses are under investigation, but did not share their names. The department is also requiring all financial institutions in Hennepin and Ramsey counties to report any overseas transfer of $3,000 or more.
“Think of the absurdity of money being wired from Minnesota by these individuals that could have come from government programs or from excess benefits,” Bessent added. “This should not be wired out of the country and we are going to be cracking down on that.”
Bessent’s visit also comes on the heels of Attorney General Pam Bondi’s announcement that a team of prosecutors is headed to Minnesota “to reinforce our U.S. Attorney’s Office and put perpetrators of this widespread fraud behind bars.”
“We will deliver severe consequences in Minnesota and stand ready to deploy to any other state where similar fraud schemes are robbing American taxpayers,” Bondi said.
Reached for comment, Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison’s office said it “categorically rejects the premise that the ‘underlying reason’ Trump has ordered the outsized presence of ICE in Minnesota is because of fraud,” and said “Ellison does have extensive experience in successfully fighting fraud.”
“What Donald Trump knows about fraud isn’t fighting it, it’s actually letting fraudsters out of prison,” Ellison’s office added.
Financial institutions are cautiously deploying AI to crack down on fraud associated with digital assets. Crypto-related scams, ransomware, darknet markets transactions and money laundering cost financial institutions $154 billion in 2025, a 162% increase from 2024, according to blockchain company Chainanalysis’ Jan. 8 report. Banks are gearing up their infrastructure to help customers transact, store and invest in digital assets, which includes developing better fraud and anti-money laundering processes, Scott Southall, managing director at Citi Services, told FinAi New. “We’ve seen AI tools being […]
The Minnesota Department of Human Services announced on Thursday that it is freezing new provider enrollments in 13 categories of Medicaid services, which it says are at high risk for fraud.
The department does not have a start date for the freeze, but it is slated to last at least six months.
Among the 13 categories deemed high risk for fraud are adult companion, day and rehabilitative mental health services, individualized home supports, residential treatment services and more.
“This action is one more step we are taking to disrupt fraudulent billing,” Temporary Human Services Commissioner Shireen Gandhi said. “We must safeguard Medicaid resources, always mindful that access to these programs is a lifeline for so many Minnesotans.”
The department says that currently enrolled providers can continue to serve clients and that the action does not freeze client enrollment. It will also provide exceptions to add new providers where capacity is needed.
Less than a month ago, the Minnesota Department of Human Services implemented a two-year moratorium on new licenses for adult day care centers in response to an uptick in providers that exceeds the number of people who need services.
In the fall, the department also suspended payments to 11 providers that serve adults with disabilities over allegations of fraud.
A newly-released report from the Office of the Legislative Auditor found “widespread failures in oversight” at the Minnesota Department of Human Services’ Behavioral Health Administration.
During a House Oversight Committee hearing on fraud in the state on Wednesday, GOP state Rep. Kristin Robbins said the fraud prevention committee in the Minnesota House has identified fraud in multiple Medicaid programs, including autism centers, sober homes, non-emergency medical transportation, integrated community supports and housing stabilization.
After a recent viral video claimed Somali-run daycares in Minnesota were committing fraud, Trump officials quickly pointed to ongoing prosecutions over such allegations, and credited the administration.
Responding to the video from conservative influencer Nick Shirley, Attorney General Pam Bondi wrote in late December that the Justice Department “has been investigating this for months. So far, we have charged 98 individuals — 85 of Somali descent — and more than 60 have been found guilty in court.”
In the Dec. 29 thread, Bondi praised the work of Trump administration appointees like Daniel Rosen, who was sworn in as the U.S. attorney in Minnesota in October. She said other agency leads “continue unraveling this scheme.”
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt has recently mentioned a similar number of fraud prosecutions in the state, while President Donald Trump has framed the case as “a new thing in Minnesota with the Somalians.”
But this isn’t new. The initial investigation dates back years, not months, and the bulk of the resulting charges were brought before Trump took office.
The administration’s narrative distorts that timeline, and misleads on some of the facts.
Trump and administration officials have ramped up rhetoric about fraud in the blue state of Minnesota since November, following a report from a conservative activist that said Somalis stole the money to use it for terrorism. The years-old claim lacks evidence.
The majority of the defendants in these fraud scandals are Somalis. Trump has cited the fraud schemes to support his immigration enforcement agenda, even though most Minnesota Somalis are U.S. citizens.
Amid this drumbeat, Gov. Tim Walz, the 2024 Democratic vice presidential nominee who has faced criticism over massive fraud that happened on his watch, announced Jan. 5 that he will not seek a third term.
FBI launched investigation in 2021 leading to dozens of charges in 2022
Feeding Our Future was a Minnesota nonprofit that received federal funding to provide meals to low-income children.
The FBI started investigating the program in May 2021, according to a state legislative auditor report.
In September 2022, federal prosecutors announced charges against 47 people, saying they stole $250 million in federal money and spent it on international vacations, real estate, jewelry and luxury cars.
They charged more people in 2023 and 2024. In June 2024, five people were indicted in a related juror bribery scheme. Before Biden left office, Andrew Luger, his U.S. attorney in Minnesota, said 70 people had been charged in the Feeding Our Future case.
The case continued under Trump. Federal prosecutors charged eight defendants in 2025, bringing the total to 78.
Other fraud cases followed
The Trump administration has brought charges against people in additional schemes tied to the earlier investigation.
Prosecutors during Trump’s current term charged 13 defendants for misusing Medicaidmoney to help people with disabilities, mental illnesses and substance use disorders secure housing. They also charged two defendants in a program to provide services for people with autism spectrum disorder.
“What we see are schemes stacked upon schemes, draining resources meant for those in need,” acting U.S. Attorney Joseph H. Thompson said.
At a news conference announcing initial charges in the housing cases, Thompson said that most of the health care fraud investigations grew from the Feeding Our Future investigations. “We just went down that rabbit hole of looking at bank records and looking to these individual companies,” he said.
Thompson also referenced the Feeding Our Future and housing charges when he later spoke about the autism investigation.
“This is not an isolated scheme,” Thompson said. “Each case we bring exposes another strand of this network.”
Fact-checking DOJ’s evidence
We asked the Justice Department why Bondi said the agency has been investigating for “months” when the majority of charges stem from an investigation that launched before Trump’s second term began.
A DOJ spokesperson said that a charge is only the beginning of the prosecution and that more people have pleaded guilty during the Trump administration than the Biden administration. As of October 2024, 23 had pleaded guilty.
Bondi noted developments during her tenure, writing on X, “In August, we successfully secured the conviction of the Feeding Our Future scheme leader, Abdiaziz Shafii Farah.” Farah was convicted at trial in 2024; he was sentenced in August.
In massive fraud investigations, much of law enforcement’s heavy lifting happens before charges are filed as authorities obtain and vet hundreds of thousands of pages of records.
“The investigative part is the most time consuming and sometimes extremely time consuming,” said Joel DeFabio, a South Florida criminal defense attorney who has represented fraud clients.
Bondi said that more than 60 had been found guilty in court, including 57 convicted in Feeding Our Future.
It’s typical for most federal charges to lead to convictions, usually as a result of plea deals because defendants want to reduce prison sentences. Their cooperation can lead to charges against additional defendants.
“There is a saying in federal court: those who cooperated and those who wish they cooperated,” DeFabio said. “You get highly rewarded at sentencing if you cooperated.”
Most of the Feeding Our Future defendants pleaded guilty or were convicted; some went to trial in 2024 and 2025.
Our ruling
Bondi said the Justice Department has been investigating fraud in Minnesota “for months. So far, we have charged 98 individuals.”
Bondi omits context about when the bulk of the charges happened.
Law enforcement and prosecutors in Minnesota have investigated this major fraud for years, starting in 2021. By mid-January 2025, before Trump took office, 70 had been charged in the Feeding Our Future case in addition to five for the related juror bribery scheme. That means about 75% of defendants charged so far predated Trump.
The Trump administration prosecutors have continued the investigation. Late in 2025, the number of Feeding Our Future defendants grew to 78, and prosecutors charged 15 in other related schemes.
We rate this statement Half True.
PolitiFact researcher Caryn Baird contributed to this fact-check.
PHNOM PENH, Cambodia — Cambodia’s government announced Wednesday it has arrested and extradited to China a prominent tycoon who allegedly led a huge online scam operation and was wanted by U.S. authorities on related criminal charges.
Cambodia’s Interior Ministry said Chen Zhi and two other Chinese citizens were arrested and extradited Tuesday following months of investigation and at the request of Chinese authorities. Chen has dual nationality and his Cambodian citizenship was revoked in December, it said.
Chen, chairman of Cambodia’s Prince Holding Group, was accused in October by the U.S. Treasury Department and the U.K. Foreign Office of heading a transnational criminal network that defrauded victims worldwide and exploited trafficked workers.
Scam centers have proliferated across Southeast Asia, swindling money from victims by persuading them to join bogus investment schemes. According to estimates from the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime, scam victims worldwide lost between $18 billion and $37 billion in 2023.
The U.S. and U.K. imposed sanctions against Chen, 38, and his companies, which were primarily involved in real estate development and financial services.
U.S. authorities seized what they said was an estimated $14 billion in bitcoin linked to Chen or his operations, and charged him with wire fraud and money laundering conspiracies. He was accused of sanctioning violence against workers, authorizing bribes to foreign officials and using his other businesses, such as online gambling and cryptocurrency mining, to launder illicit profits.
Prosecutors in the U.S. charged that his organization scammed 250 Americans out of millions of dollars, with one losing $400,000 in cryptocurrency. In 2024, Americans lost at least $10 billion to Southeast Asia-based scams, according to the U.S. Treasury Department.
There was no immediate comment on the extraditions from the federal prosecutors’ office in Brooklyn where Chen had been indicted. Chen and the Prince Holding Group had denied any wrongdoing.
Chinese authorities had no immediate comment on the extradition of Chen and the two other individuals named by Cambodia’s Interior Ministry as Xu Ji Liang and Shao Ji Hui.
Jacob Daniel Sims, a transnational crime expert and visiting fellow at Harvard University’s Asia Center, said the Cambodian government had faced so much sustained international pressure that inaction was no longer an option.
“Handing Chen Zhi to China was the path of least resistance. It defuses Western scrutiny while aligning with Beijing’s likely preference to keep a politically sensitive case out of U.S. and U.K. courts,” Sims said.
Amnesty International last year published the findings of an 18-month investigation into cybercrime in Cambodia, which the human rights group said “point towards state complicity in abuses carried out by Chinese criminal gangs.”
“What we are seeing here is a mafia state actor backed into a corner and choosing the best among bad options, not signs of legitimate reform,” Sims said.
In addition to the bitcoin seized by the U.S. government, British authorities froze Chen’s British businesses and assets, including a 12 million-euro-mansion and a 100-million-euro office building in London. Other assets were later seized in Singapore, Taiwan and Hong Kong.
Cybercrime has flourished in Southeast Asia where law enforcement is weak, particularly in Cambodia and Myanmar, with casinos often serving as hubs for criminal activity. Trafficked foreign nationals were employed to run “romance” and cryptocurrency scams, often recruited with false job offers and then forced to work in conditions of near-slavery.
Chen’s U.S. indictment alleged that Prince Holding Group built at least 10 compounds in Cambodia.
The operations became an embarrassment to the Chinese government, especially when they targeted Chinese citizens. Beijing in mid-2023 pressured Myanmar to crack down on the crimes, and some kingpins were extradited to be tried in China. Several received death sentences.
A 2023 report by the U.N. human rights office estimated that at least 120,000 people across Myanmar and 100,000 people in Cambodia may have been held in situations where they were forced to work on online scams. Experts believe that such operations are continuing.
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Associated Press writer Grant Peck reported from Bangkok. AP writers Michael Sisak in New York and Jack Brook in New Orleans contributed to this report.
As the Trump administration continues to investigate a series of alleged fraud schemes at Minnesota day care centers run by Somali residents, social media users are falsely citing a Craigslist ad as evidence of such deceit.
The ad, which is no longer live, said a day care center in Minneapolis’ Ventura Village neighborhood was hiring 20 child actors for three days to pose as attendees while it is vetted by the state. It noted the children would be paid $1,500 per day.
But the ad was a prank. It is not proof of fraud in Minnesota.
Here’s a closer look at the facts.
CLAIM: A Craigslist ad seeking child actors to legitimize a Minnesota day care center is proof of alleged fraud perpetrated by Somali residents.
THE FACTS: This is false. The ad, which was posted Jan. 1 in Craigslist’s Hennepin County, Minnesota, section for general labor jobs, was bait for an online prank show, its cohost Joey LaFleur told The Associated Press.
“The show’s called Goofcon1 and it is a funny show,” LaFleur said. “We do pranks and stuff like that.”
He added the show received a “ton of responses” to the ad and said he and his two cohosts will be doing a live show Saturday where they will call people who expressed interest.
Screenshots of the ad were used in social media posts on multiple platforms, cited as proof of fraud at Minnesota day care centers. The posts gained tens of thousands of likes, shares and views.
“BREAKING – A Craigslist ad seeking child actors for a daycare in Minneapolis’ Hennepin County has been discovered, with the poster requesting 20 children to act as clients while the state observes them to determine whether it’s a legitimate daycare,” reads one X post sharing the ad.
A man in a TikTok video called the ad “100% serious.” The video was viewed approximately 14,300 times.
LaFleur said that in addition to being a prank show, Goofcon1 wants to protect against predators and call out conservatives who “don’t care about fact checking.”
Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz ended his bid for a third term Monday amid President Donald Trump’s relentless focus on the fraud investigations. Also Monday, the Trump administration said it’s planning to tighten rules for federal child care funds.
Preparing to welcome kids back to her day care centers after some time off around the holidays, Monique Stumon, director of the School Readiness Learning Academy in Minneapolis, doesn’t know what to expect as 2026 begins.
“I call the help line with CCAP to ask some questions about billing. There was no information available,” Stumon said.
She’s referring to Minnesota’s Child Care Assistance Program, which officials say supports 23,000 children and 12,000 families in accessing health care, and invested $306.6 million for affordable child care for the state in fiscal year 2024.
The announced freeze seems to be based entirely on conservative YouTuber Nick Shirley’s video, which features him going to 10 day care centers and claiming they are empty. On Friday, the state’s Department of Children, Youth and Families responded to to the video, revealing the results of their own investigation conducted this week.
The state agency in a news release on Friday said a facility mentioned in the video has been closed since 2018, and that investigators with the Office of Inspector General found children at eight other facilities while conducting compliance checks this week. One of the facilities that underwent an inspection did not have children present because it was not yet open for the day when officials were at the site.
Day care providers who say they are following the rules don’t know when exactly the money will be cut off and what can be done to stop it. Stumon said that about 80% of the children at her day care, which has been licensed since 2009 and faces no fraud allegations, rely on CCAP. Stumon estimates they’d only last a month before needing to close their doors if funding were to end now.
“I’m concerned that children will be left home alone. I’m concerned about the school agers that come in here every day after school because their parents have to work,” Stumon said.
She noted that she was able to bill the program as of Friday morning, but isn’t sure what will happen next week.
State officials said a letter from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ Administration for Children and Families indicates that there is a Jan. 9 deadline for Minnesota to submit information demanded by federal officials. The information requested includes:
Total amount of Child Care and Development Fund or Temporary Assistance for Needy Families child care funds received by five specific child care centers.
For any of the specifically named centers that did receive CCDF or TANF funds, the state must provide specific documentation around areas like attendance, inspections and assessments.
Complete CCDF administrative data for all recipients, including name, address, social security number, date of birth and any state-issued identification numbers used for program administration.
Information related to alleged fraud networks and oversight failures.
Comprehensive list of all CCDF Funded providers and intermediaries, including total CCDF funding received.
The state agency, citing the letter, said federal officials are looking for each of those data points between 2022 and 2025.
State officials added that there will “be a temporary restriction for Minnesota to draw down CCDF federal reimbursement” and that more information on the limitation will be given on Monday.
